


7734

by primeideal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mathematics, Sloth with a side of gluttony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22038562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/pseuds/primeideal
Summary: The prompt was for an evil calculator whose "SIN" button really causes wrongdoing, that's it that's the story.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: New Year's Sins Flash Exchange





	7734

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_Creative](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_Creative/gifts).



> This is probably anachronistic because with cell phones and stuff I assume kids these days no longer are charmed by the video-game potential of the majestic TI-83, but *shrug*

_Think of a radian,_ the textbook said, _as measuring the size of a pizza whose three sides--two straight and one circular--are all exactly the same length. If you compare this to an equilateral triangle, you can see that a radian is slightly less than one-sixth of a full circle._ This didn't help, because now Katie wanted pizza.

Rolling her eyes, she hit the _pi_ button and divided by four--pie would be nice, too--and then reached down for the [i]sin[/i]. It wasn't much, just a scientific calculator. Katie's sister Megan had a TI-83 and knew how to play video games on it, and their cousin Thomas had completely busted his TI-89 by playing around with the buttons you definitely weren't supposed to press and had to take the weird battery on and off again. Still, it was enough for trig, or it was supposed to be.

It occurred to Katie that all of the exercises were odd, which meant that they were all in the back of the book, and she would probably have more time for pizza if she did that. Who ever used radians, anyway? Was the sign on the side of the road ever going to say "pi over six radian slope, heavy trucks do not enter?" No it wasn't.

She scrawled down the square roots, and then paced down to the kitchen.

* * *

Ms. Schuldt would probably have said something corny about how cheating was only hurting herself, because when she got to the test she wouldn't have remembered anything. Blah blah blah. Unfortunately, Ms. Schuldt had a point, because when Katie got to the test she did not, in fact, remember much at all about how to do trig. There was something about SOHCAHTOA and Ms. Schuldt had said to try to remember it like it was a native chieftain's name, and Ryan had said something about how that was inappropriate and one shouldn't trivialize indigenous cultures by making fun of their names. Blah blah blah. Katie jabbed at her calculator with the tip of her pencil and wished she could be poking Ms. Schuldt with it. sin(sin(sin(sin(0)))).

She raised her hand.

Ms. Schuldt paced over. "If you're asking about #13, that's a typo. It should be _meters_ per second, not feet."

Whatever. "May I go to the bathroom?"

"You're an adult, Katie, you don't have to ask."

Given that the rest of the class's levels of adulthood consisted of failing their driver's tests (Sofia), making out under the bleachers in lieu of watching the abysmal football team (Joe and Phil), posting cynical viral images online (mostly Ryan), or collapsing under the weight of backpacks that weighed more than they did (the annoying eighth-grade prodigy), Katie was unconvinced, but she made her way for the bathroom anyway.

Lest you get the wrong idea about Katie's moral character, going to the bathroom was not an excuse to meet her classmates who had taken the same exam in second period and get their notes. Certainly not. Katie was entirely above that sort of treachery, and furthermore, her friends weren't really the type to remember the answers to their math tests anyway.

Instead, it was an excuse to pull the fire alarm.

Once the rest of the class was shivering outside in the slush, Ms. Schuldt said that she had no choice but to excuse them all from the test. "You can make it up at the end of the quarter if you want to try to raise your grade that way," she said, to general approval.

"Probably the cafeteria again," Sofia speculated. "They can't even defrost pizza right."

"Actually," said Ryan, "a lot of cafeteria employees are underpaid, that's why they're unionizing..."

* * *

They had to bring their calculators to biology. Of course they did, because biology wasn't just about cutting open dead frogs or coloring in parts of the cell, they had to do stupid Punnett squares and statistics. "So if two men made a baby," Sofia asked, "there'd be a 25% chance it was a girl, 50% chance it was a boy, and a 25% chance it'd be a...superman?"

"Let's go back to the peas," said Mr. Bauer.

Anyway, Katie was idly running her fingers across the calculator to remind herself it could be worse. As bad as biology got, at least there were no radians.

She pushed the sin button again, and realized that Mr. Bauer probably hadn't changed his tie or his stupid attempts at puns in five years. Megan would have done the same assignment, and probably thought it was fun, like a nerd.

Sure enough, that night when she got home it didn't take much to look up Megan's copy of Mendel_Quest.PDF, with all the dumb word problems about baby Wookiees and inbred cats and endangered species. Mr. Bauer hadn't even updated the ones about sickle cell anemia. "I'm doing research, Dad," she yelled, as another page printed out.

Fortunately, Megan had scribbled her name on the first page of the stapled pile rather than type it into the document. Katie did the same.

* * *

Instead of doing the reading for English, or even finding SparkNotes, she jumped onto Ryan's bandwagon of questions about whether the syllabus was appropriately nuanced. She "forgot" her tennis shoes in her gym locker and had to troop back in her flip-flops while the marching band director yelled at her classmates. She contributed to her group project in US History by playing "The Room Where It Happens" on full volume. School really was easy once she showed some initiative.

And yet, when her teachers warned her that the next round of standardized tests would be even more draining than the last, Katie wasn't able to shrug them off or to point out how it was their problem for teaching to the tests, anyway. She wanted to get a great ACT score and scholarship offers like Megan had. And maybe, deep down, part of her actually wanted to enjoy school as much as Thomas did, even if he was a dork.

So as she doodled on the edges of her notebook again, and chewed on the fringes of the three-hole-punched paper, she noticed that the calculator had a (2nd) key to access obscure functions written in yellow above the main buttons. ln(x) instead of e^x. Square root instead of x^2. And there, right above the trig buttons she'd poked so often, sin^(-1). The inverse function.

When she pressed that, she didn't feel any overwhelming guilt, or any urgent desire to make things right. There was just a vague curiosity, a sense of, _hmm, I wonder if I could ask Ms. Schuldt for extra practice problems to make sure I understand. Maybe even do the even ones._

There wouldn't always be clear right and wrong answers in the world. But there might in trig.


End file.
